Israel's Top Court Won't Act vs Widespread Police Surveillance

When a bill dealing with law enforcement and communications data was submitted to the Knesset in 2007, it was blasted by jurists, lawmakers, and human rights activists alike. It was dubbed “the Big Brother Law,” Oded Yaron reported for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Photo Insert: Israel's High Court of Justice

Nonetheless, the disturbing proposal, officially named the Enforcement Authorities – Communications Data Law, passed. In 2012 it was even ratified by the High Court of Justice when a panel of seven justices denied petitions filed against it by the Civil Rights Association and the Bar Association.

The law enables the police and other enforcement agencies to obtain personal information on any person from cellular phone companies and internet providers on the person’s whereabouts, names of persons or organizations called or emailed, websites visited, and more.

The justices, headed by former Supreme Court President Justice Dorit Beinisch, agreed that the law could lead to a serious violation of privacy, but ruled that the infringement was proportional.

“After examining carefully all the arrangements in the law and its procedures, we’ve concluded that since the proper interpretation to activate these powers – which mainly calls to apply it sparingly and only in the necessary circumstances – we found no cause for constitutional intervention,” wrote Beinisch.

Monitoring smartphone owners’ calls and internet activity could enable ongoing and unsupervised access to individuals’ lives (and to the lives of third parties associated with them), while they have no control of the extent of information that might be exposed to the investigators, says the NGO Privacy Israel today.

Information the police provided in response to the NGO’s request for freedom of information raises grave doubts regarding the trust Beinisch and her colleagues had placed in the authorities.

The justices didn’t give the enforcement authorities carte blanche to use the law for any purpose, but counted on the oversight bodies – the courts, which sign the surveillance orders, the Knesset’s legal advisor, who receives reports about exigent requests with no court order) and the Knesset itself, which was supposed to supervise the law’s application.

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